


Your Day Will Come

by lobsterMatriarch



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/F, POV Original Character, Post-Canon, Post-Endgame, Survivor Guilt, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-10-29 07:44:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10849539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lobsterMatriarch/pseuds/lobsterMatriarch
Summary: Some had railed against the scavengers roaming the Crown City since the scourge ended, cursing them as defilers, grave robbers, everything you’d expect from the superstitious masses. But the pragmatists, the legions of hunters who had risen in the night, they know that people need to survive. The dead aren’t going to care who's driving their cars these days, but the living need to travel.A.K.A. Legends are only born in the right circumstances. Someone has to be there to hear them, and someone has to be there to tell them.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Soooo this involves a bit of optimism regarding the game's ending, but not much. Original character POV, a few liberties taken with canon here and there. Chocobro OT4 if you squint, but that comes later. Oh, and Harold, they're lesbians.

“This can’t be what you were after.” Val kicked a chunk of what might’ve once been a window ledge down the road, watching as it skipped along the pavement before disappearing into yet another crater. Judging from the depth of the hole and the clean, straight line it cut, it had been created by a sword. Iron giant, most likely— not enough ash for a red one, and a yojimbo wouldn’t have the weight to crack the pavement.  
  
Val wouldn’t recognize this, but children born in the scourge learned methods of daemon tracking early and often. It was necessary to survival— observing movement patterns, numbers, and weaknesses— and though daemons had long since become boogeymen for campfire stories, Kallysta found that some habits were hard to break.  
  
“Are you trying to tell me you’re not impressed?” she asked.  
  
“Hey, I didn’t say that,” Val jumped to tap her palm against a broken streetlight, dark eyes cast upwards towards the skyline. “I mean, it’s pretty to look at, and it’s a complete gold mine for tech. I just don’t get why people treat it like some kind of ‘hallowed ground.’”  
  
“It’s not _hallowed ground_ , it’s just…” Kallysta sighed in frustration.  
  
“‘ _Only scourge kids would understand, Valory, you’re just too young._ ’” Val lowered her voice in mock solemnity before snickering under her breath.  
  
“Laugh all you want, doesn’t make it any less true.” Black stains across the billboard to the right— flan or custard, easily twice the size of any Kallysta had seen as a child. “I don’t know about the stories with chosen kings and magic rocks, but whatever happened, it happened here.”  
  
“Insomnia. In- _som_ -nia.” Val tested the word a few times, as if she was cracking a code. “Who knew buildings could get this tall?”  
  
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall.” Kallysta heaved her pack to her other shoulder, as the first was beginning to numb from the weight. “Keep an eye out, we don’t want to miss anything worth taking.”  
  
Some had railed against the scavengers roaming the Crown City since the scourge ended, cursing them as defilers, grave robbers, everything you’d expect from the superstitious masses. But the pragmatists, the legions of hunters who had risen in the night, they knew that people needed to survive. The dead weren’t going to care who was driving their cars these days, but the living needed to travel. Kallysta had always considered herself one of the pragmatists, dragging their broken down truck across the country looking for salvage, but here, with the buildings standing tall and proud despite the carnage they’d seen… she could at least understand where the superstitions came from.  
  
“Someone else got here first.” Val groaned, pointing at the ashes of a fairly recent fire. “I bet they cleaned out the whole block.”  
  
“We don’t know that for sure,” Kallysta said. “The city’s huge, and people can’t always tell what’s valuable at a glance.”  
  
“Yeah, but scavengers always take the phones first, and you know I need a new one.”  
  
Kallysta snorted. “You’ve got a one-track mind, don’t you?”  
  
“If I’m out fishing and I get attacked by a sahagin, don’t you want me to have a way to call for help? Do you want me to die out there, Kallysta? All alone, with no one to come rescue me?” Val put her hands on her hips, every bit the drama queen she claimed she no longer was.  
  
“And I’m sure this has nothing to do with wanting to play King’s Knight mobile…”  
  
Val shrugged. “Two birds, one stone.”  
  
Kallysta stood on her tiptoes, checking the broken streetlight. The lightbulb inside was still intact, but covered in the same black stains as the billboard. Gross. “Well right now Lestallum needs copper to keep the power grid running, so I think that’s going to have to take priority. I promise we can look for a phone afterwards.”  
  
“On a scale of one to ten, what’s the likelihood of finding one without a cracked screen?”  
  
“Zero.”  
  
Val set her pack down, grumbling even as she checked through the store windows. With time ticking by and skyscraper shadows creeping larger across empty roads, Kallysta could never shake the feeling that time wasn't on their side. Nothing to fear from the night except blindness and other scavengers, but even so...  
  
It was hard for her not to envy the new generation born in daylight, or the ones like Val who were too young to remember the First Dawn. Val was really just along for the company, she didn’t care about the weapons they could loot, or the hours until sunset, or all the lightbulbs left in broken streetlights that Kallysta would have killed for as a kid. She was made for the sunshine, thrived in it, let it brighten her hair and darken her skin, while Kallysta, white as the bones still resting in this city, knew the sun would only ever burn her.  
  
She shivered, though the breeze was warm. “We should start thinking about making camp soon.”  
  
“Aw, come on, we've got a little bit of time…”

"Not enough." Kallysta saw the shadows creeping closer, broken only by the sunset shining in cracked glass windows.

"Let's give it one more hour." Val took her hand, leading her back towards their truck. “I’ve got an idea, if you trust me.”  
  
“I guess?”  
  
“Not a great show of faith, but I’ll take it. Get in, I’m driving.”  
  
Kallysta climbed into the passenger’s side without argument; better to stay moving until they could find a safe place for the night. Val hummed as she turned the keys, first halfway to the engine’s cough and sputter and then twice more before she could get it to fully start. Even with the debris in the way, travel was smooth enough to let the mind wander as they watched the buildings go by.  
  
They stayed like that for a while, comfortably silent while passing by weaves of concrete bridges, massive supermarkets, even a building Kallysta was pretty sure was just meant for housing video games. It was amazing how people used to live, with huge chunks of space carved out for fun, for books, for buying food brought in from halfway across the world. People could travel across the city in minutes, go out and buy a new phone if their old ones broke, and back then they thought nothing of it.  
  
Maybe people would live like that again, someday.  
  
“You know,” Val said, finally breaking the silence. “I hope the stories aren’t true.”  
  
“What, about Insomnia?”  
  
"Yeah." Val shuddered. “Tons of people already died here, we know that for a fact. And I mean, if it all happened on purpose, if a bunch of old gods and dead kings organized it so that they lost everything for a future they would never be a part of…”  
  
"Don’t worry. I don’t think any gods are out to pick their human sacrifices, and if they are it sure as hell wouldn't be you.”  
  
“Hey!” A sharp elbow hit Kallysta’s side.  
  
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding!” she laughed. “But think about it, with the starscourge gone the Six have no reason to care what we do. Maybe they can do us all a favor and leave us alone for a century or two.”  
  
“Maybe, maybe not.” Val slowed to a stop, taking a deep breath before setting the car in park. Kallysta checked out the window.  
  
“Oh no. Oh no no no.”  
  
She knew the shape of the building from old newspapers saved in Lestallum— the Citadel, looming massive against the darkening sky. Even in disrepair the building was regal, pale stone carved intricately and perfectly set in pillars that blocked out the sun.  
  
Kallysta locked her door. “Val, we have to turn around.”  
  
“Oh come on,” Val was already out, pulling her pack from the back of the truck. “This is the one place in the city that I’m pretty sure no one has ever touched. Everywhere else has been picked over at least once, we'd be digging forever.”  
  
“Did you ever stop to think that maybe there’s a reason no one comes here?”  
  
“Obviously there’s a reason, it’s just a crappy reason.” Now Val was pulling Kallysta’s pack out, too. “Superstitions don’t mean anything, you were the one who told me that.”  
  
“It’s… some of it is more than superstitions.” Kallysta tried to force down the gnawing in the pit of her stomach. The starscourge had been gone for twenty years now, but before that it had somehow survived for millennia. What if it was just dormant? Wouldn’t that make a great legend, "The Girls Who Unleashed Daemons on All of Eos… Again."  
  
But Val was still right, only the bravest or most desperate scavengers would even come close to this place. Not to mention the Kingsglaive supplies, the Crownsguard supplies, all of them likely hidden somewhere within those towers...  
  
Val nudged her side. “Come on. Half of Lucis already thinks of us as looters, we might as well live up to the title.”  
  
“I’ll think on it.” Kallysta said, with only a slight intention of thinking on it. “But we’re making camp outside. I’d rather keep an eye on this place before we make a move.”  
  
“What, are the daemons are gonna get mad if we wake them up too soon?”  
  
Kallysta gave a withering glare, and Val’s grin turned sheepish.  
  
“I love you?” she offered, stepping just a bit closer. Kallysta sighed.  
  
“Go get the tent. I’m cooking tonight.”  


* * *

  
  
_The repeating crash of steel on iron was deafening, overwhelming her senses, setting her teeth on edge. Another blast of lightning— narrow miss, much too narrow— she tried ducking to the left only to find her path blocked by a blade of fire. It’s brilliance nearly blinded her— her eyes had adjusted too well to the darkness; they needed to, if she was going to see in the pitch-black of eternal night._  
  
_“Watch yourself!” She heard a deep voice call to her, familiar and foreign all at once. Though she didn’t know who it was coming from, it heartened her nonetheless. On her other side she heard the soft, sharp cuts of dual knives— another ally, a name she could almost remember but had never heard in her life._  
  
_The red giant moved and she tucked away to the side, hoping not to catch the attention of the nagaraja to their right. Her circular saw was missing, replaced by the weight of a pistol at her hip and some sort of machinery she didn’t recognize…_  
  
_“We just have to hold out a little longer,” a new voice, softer, with an accent she couldn’t place. “If we can buy him more time we’ll be—“_  
  
_The voice cut off with a quiet slash, and a gurgle that made her feel ill._  
  
_She had to get to him._  
  
_With a haphazard slide she managed to dodge another swing of the flaming sword, shielding her eyes against the brightness. She drew her pistol as she saw him, suspended in the air by the tip of a yojimbo’s blade._  
  
_“Hey!” The daemon turned, tossing his body aside and leaving just enough of an opening for her to land three rounds clean in its neck. It dissolved back into the darkness, only to be replaced by two more._  
  
_No time for that now, not when her ally, her friend, was still on the ground…_  
  
_“Hey!” She rushed to his side, hand on his shoulder, oh shit oh_ shit _he’s still not moving—_  
  
“Hey!”


	2. Chapter 2

"Hey!"

Kallysta jerked awake, hand already on her circular saw as she sat upright. It had been a while since she heard anyone’s voice beyond Val’s and her own, and no matter how friendly it might sound, any living thing out here wasn’t likely to be a friend.  
  
“So I can’t really knock because, y’know, it’s a tent, but can I come in? Ok no, that’d be pretty weird… can you come out instead?” High energy and middling pitch, the voice was likely masculine. A slight roughness suggested age or smoke, or both.  
  
“Kally?” Val’s voice was smaller than usual, and her arm tightened around Kallysta’s waist.  
  
“We’re armed!” Kallysta leveled the saw as best she could, prone as they both were.  
  
“Okay, that’s fine, but I’m not here to rob you.”  
  
“What do you want!?”  
  
She heard the crunch of gravel and a soft thump, the sound of flesh hitting pavement. “To say hi? No one ever comes out this far, I thought it might be nice to have company.”

They looked to one another. _What the fuck is happening?_ Val mouthed— Kallysta wished she had an answer.  
  
“Alright, we’re coming out!” she shouted, lowering her saw just a little. “But no sudden moves, and keep your hands where we can see them!”  
  
“Whatever you say, oh armed one. Armed ones? Plural?”  
  
Val started to attention, as if she needed reminding that she was better with a dagger than most veteran hunters. Together they agreed— count of 3, then charge.

1.

Val found her knives, testing their weight before settling on a grip.

2—  
  
“Valory, what the hell?!” Kallysta tripped over the blanket as she stumbled out behind Val, who had leapt out with fury and fervor never seen this early in the morning. She had to blink against the blinding glare of the sunrise, but sure enough, there was Val with her knife to the throat of their mysterious stranger. He stayed true to his word this far, hands in the air while he sat cross-legged on the cracked pavement.  
  
“Hah, whoops. It’s been so long since I’ve seen anyone out here, I almost forgot what kind of world we live in.” He eyed the knife to his throat with seemingly mild concern. “I probably shouldn’t have startled you like that, huh?”  
  
Kallysta glared, assessing the stranger as best she could while keeping her saw aimed. Greying hair and laugh lines betrayed his age, though the same couldn’t be said for his fashion sense (only stalkers and victims of fashion could pull off that much black). He was agile, wiry, with leather gloves worn from use, and the straps partially hidden under his overshirt could easily carry a concealed weapon. Most notable were the pink ridges of a heavy burn, healed years ago, traveling from his jaw down his neck before disappearing under the collar of his shirt. Kallysta had seen scars like that before— red giant, no doubt about it.  
  
“You a hunter?” she asked.  
  
“Part-time now, but yeah.” He said. “I keep hoping I’ll get to retire, but it seems like there’s always more work to do.”  
  
“And what in your work brings you out here?”  
  
He thought for a moment. “Well, this isn’t really for work. I just come out to visit the citadel sometimes.”  
  
“No one comes out here for any reason, let alone just to visit.” Kallysta sneered. Strangers who played innocent were usually the most dangerous.  
  
The hunter shook out his stiff elbows before lifting his hands back in the air. “Well how would anyone know that no one ever comes out here unless someone came out here to check?”

“He’s got you there.” Val smirked, lowering her knives just a little.   
  
“Does this mean I can put my hands down?”  
  
“No!” Kallysta shouted, and the stranger ducked back from the blade of her saw. Val watched, thoughtful, and some of the fight seemed to drain from her.  
  
“Kally, what if he’s telling the truth?”  
  
Kallysta shot her a glare. “We’re not taking that—“  
  
“Just hear me out for a second.” Val started, and the hunter nodded enthusiastically. Kallysta kept her saw leveled, even as Val tucked her daggers into a leather hold in her belt.  
  
“Alright, so you were all freaked out about going into the citadel because you don’t know what’s in there, right?"

Kallysta nodded reluctantly.

"And then who conveniently shows up," Val gestured to the hunter, "but someone who knows what’s in there?”  
  
“I like her, she’s smart. You should definitely listen to her.” The hunter said.  
  
“Quiet!” Kallysta snapped. Still, she let Val continue, and Val jumped at the chance.  
  
“I mean, what if this is fate? What if this is a sign that we’re supposed to find what’s in there?”  
  
“Fate? What happened to ‘superstitions don’t mean anything?’”  
  
Val shrugged, turning to face the massive building. It did look different in the morning light, windows shining gold and not a shadow in sight. Once upon a time it must have been brilliant, the perfect place to greet foreign diplomats and rich patrons and whoever else politicians spent time with when they weren't worried about human extinction.  
  
The hunter sighed, finally setting his hands down on his knees— the harness under his jacket caught the morning light.

“I’m gonna be honest with you," he started slowly, "I really hate killing things. In fact, I come here so that I can get a break from killing things. I don't even want to _think_ about killing things. And I would really, really hate killing you."  
  
Kallysta raised her saw again. “Don’t you dare threaten me.”

"Don't think of it as a threat so much as me asking for a favor." He gave a sheepish grin. "If you don’t want to talk, can we just go our separate ways and pretend this never happened?”  
  
Kallysta snarled and reached to activate the spinning blade; something was wrong, the weight was off and something tapped the underside just enough to throw her off. Still it roared to life, violent and menacing with the blood of Lucian wildlife still dried between the ridges, before a string of nuts and washers fell to her feet, followed by the circular blade itself. It hit the ground with a single, sad, ding, one that echoed through the empty street.

Kallysta looked up, livid, to see the hunter with his shit-eating grin tossing the lower bolt casually in his hand.

_Smug bastard._  
  
“It’s for the wrong model, you know. It was going to fall out eventually.”  
  
“You see if you can do better without being able to shop for parts.” Maybe if she knocked out a tooth or two, he'd finally stop grinning.  
  
The hunter raised his hands again, almost as a peace offering. “I’m not saying it isn’t a pretty sweet rig, as far as post-darkness rigs go. I guess I’m a little spoiled when it comes to weaponry.”  
  
Kallysta was still debating if she should aim for the teeth or the nose, but Val seemed to have put all sense of self-preservation behind her.  
  
“Spoiled how?” she asked.  
  
The hunter’s grin faded to a genuine smile. “Well I mean, there was this guy I knew back at Hammerhead who could do incredible things with machinery… plus Lucis always got the Crownsguard pretty much anything they wanted.”  
  
“Wait, Crownsguard?” Val’s face lit up in excitement.

He nodded.

"As in, you know how to get Crownsguard supplies?" Val sounded practically giddy, and Kallysta took a moment from contemplating violence to listen in.  
  
“I… guess?” He paused to think. “Yeah, I could probably get you in there.”  
  
“Kallysta, we have to go.” Val was already standing well within arms length of the hunter, completely unarmed and without a thought for her safety. If this weirdo wanted her dead, he already had plenty of opportunity.

_Crownsguard supplies. We'd never have to scavenge again._ Kallysta looked to Val, who was already making fast friends with the potential serial killer.

They could be home in Meldacio, fishing every day, only traveling because they wanted to and not because they were out of ammo with the threat of bandits closing in. And didn't the Crownsguard have some sort of highly portable kitchen, food storage and all?

Somewhere in the distance, Val was laughing at something the hunter said. Wouldn't it be worth it to keep her safe?  
  
Kallysta dropped her now-useless saw to the ground, listening to its rusty groan as it threatened once again to come apart at the seams. With one last glance from the hunter to Val, she headed towards the gates to the citadel. She did her best to control her breathing even as she heard Val’s whoop of excitement behind her, and the sound of what might have been a high five.

* * *

 

  
With even steps Kallysta crossed the bridge leading to the arched entry, and whatever might be behind it. If she kept her eyes straight ahead and put one foot in front of the other, maybe she could control the hammering of her heart in her chest.

_Steel on iron, bullets fired, the sick gurgle of blood as a soft, encouraging voice faded to nothing—_

She passed the unmistakeable marks of battle, multiplying with every step closer she took— black stains of ash on the pavement, neat, rust-red stripes across the railings, a spot of cracked pavement just the right size for a body— iron giants, bombs, potentially even something Kallysta had never seen.

_Blinding red against the darkness, no gods, only daemons. The smell of burning flesh, so hot it freezes—_

She forced her eyes upward as she climbed the scorched stairs that lead to the entry, trying to ignore the lingering smell of ash. The windows of the citadel still glowed bright in sunlight, grounding, a ward against the darkness.

It's safe here, she reminded herself. Val and the hunter were laughing behind her, telling some joke or story she didn't think she could be part of right now.

_What happened here?_


End file.
